


Space Ways

by Gammarad



Category: Pecos Bill and Slue Foot Sue (American Tall Tale)
Genre: F/M, IN SPACE!, Tall Tales, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24075916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: A spaceship with a grudge can sabotage even the most perfect whirlwind romance.
Relationships: Pecos Bill/Slue-Foot Sue
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7
Collections: Once Upon a Fic 2020





	Space Ways

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karrenia_rune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karrenia_rune/gifts).



> Based on [Pecos Bill and Slue-foot Sue, A Texas Tall Tale retold by S. E. Schlosser](https://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/08/pecos_bill_and_sluefoot_sue.html) (And also inspired by [Pecos Bill Rides a Tornado](https://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/pecos_bill_rides_a_tornado.html) by the same author.)

### Meeting

Slue-foot Sue didn't remember the day she left Earth or the last time she saw her mother, but she remembered the day she met Pecos Bill. She'd been racing her sloop Bel Aire along one of Saturn's rings, braiding the next three over with her gravitation lance as she went. It was her favorite way to practice slaloms and prettify the planets at the same time. 

"That's fine shooting," she'd heard in an unfamiliar drawl over ship to ship communications. Bel Aire herself had sent back ship-style affirmation and put the call sign of the speaker into Sue's helmet display. "Pecos Bill aboard Widow-Maker," she read. "He isn't half stuck on his own self," she had commented to her ship. 

But she'd heard of Pecos Bill, everyone had. Especially about the time he rode an asteroid. Sue hadn't credited the story for a moment, especially since it started with him jumping onto it as it slingshot past Earth one day. The story went that Bill clung on tight as it dipped and dodged through the Belt, then stayed hooked on even after his air gave out by siphoning oxygen off Europa as it skittered by, held out all the way to the Kuiper Belt and only let go as the asteroid plummeted down to Jupiter and landed in the Red Spot. 

The story was, the Red Spot had barely been a freckle on the side of the Big Planet til Pecos Bill dropped an asteroid on it and made it the biggest storm in the solar system. But Sue refused to believe that part or most any part of the tale. No asteroid pulled stunts like that. If it'd been a comet, well, it might have been true if it was a comet, but not an asteroid.

Widow-Maker, though, was something special. Sue watched that ship through her porthole when she was done shot-braiding the rings and salivated so much her suit activated the feed mechanism and stuffed a flapjack into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed out of habit, but then made sure not to drool any more, though she hadn't seen a finer, faster ship in all her life.

"Race me," she sent in reply to Pecos Bill after maybe ten minutes. "First one to land a puck on Puck wins." Puck was the tiny moon orbiting Uranus close by. Less than 100 kilometers in radius, blocked by Uranus at half the angles, it was a challenging target for even the best shot. 

They raced. It was near a tie, but loath as she was to admit it, Pecos Bill's depleted uranium disk landed on the cratered ice-rock surface several milliseconds before Sue's. "Match to you," she said, admiration and annoyance warring in her tone. "What forfeit?"

"Just give me a meal aboard your ship and we'll call it even," Bill said.

They dined and they drank and one thing led to another and by the time they woke up the next morning they were engaged. 

### Marriage

Wasn't a big shindig, Bill and Sue were in a hurry so they leapfrogged to Mars Vegas and got hitched in front of a Martian judge. His giant skull gleamed like the shine off a comet as he pronounced them wedded for as long as they both should wish. 

Sue had on the hoopiest getup she had been saving for a special occasion. It had rings around her ankles and rings around her wrists and a big pair of loops at the back of her head, futuristic as all get out and awkward for hugging. She liked the looks of it and from what she could tell, so did Pecos Bill. 

They went dancing at the Martian clubs and gambling at the Martian casinos and got drunker than the night they met at the Martian bars, and Bill started bragging about how his ship Widow-Maker wouldn't let anyone pilot but him. Anyone else, Widow-Maker wouldn't go, or took them off wrong, ejected the pilot seat, oh, all sorts of tricks that ship played on anyone who dared think they were a match for the most ornery and evil-minded ship in the system.

Sue got it in her head that she was the one who'd teach that ship who was boss, and it was her. She pestered and wheedled and ultimatumed her way into a very drunk Pecos Bill agreeing to let her try. 

When they sobered up, both of them had doubts but their pride wouldn't let them admit it. So Bill stayed on Bel Aire while Sue tried to fly Widow-Maker. 

Now, the thing Sue didn't know, that almost no one knew about Widow-Maker was that the reason he was the fastest ship in the system was that he had a secret and dangerous time travel mechanism. For every ten seconds Widow-Maker flew, he went back one, giving him a speed boost over everyone else using the same drive. That ill-tempered ship couldn't trick Slue-Foot Sue or resist her skills so he did the only thing left, juiced up his time machine that she didn't even know about and bucked her off into the past.

Well, Sue found herself in some kind of historical scene, on Earth it looked like, and she got a good look around and then those rings in her fancy outfit that she still had on, too futuristic for this rustic era, bounced her forward into the future. Not just onward to the time she was from, no, those rings bounced her a thousand years past that and all the way to Alpha Centauri. 

Too far, and the rebound pulled her into the past again.

Sue went back and forth, forward and reverse, over and over until she felt distinctly time-sick. Places seemed to vary. It took Sue ten or eleven bounces to figure out she was always landing in proximity to where Pecos Bill was in each particular time. 

It took Bill a few more bounces to notice, but once he did, he always did. He tried catching her and holding on like he would to a bronco, but the time bounces pulled her out of his grip. He tried lassoing her and the rope fell to the ground when she vanished again. In desperation he tried shooting her.

Pecos Bill had perfect aim. The laser beam he shot hit Sue right in the heart. 

When Slue-Foot Sue found herself in the past again, she wasn't bouncing anymore, and while there was a hole in her chest, it was nicely cauterized. She healed up pretty fast. She was somewhere in New Mexico, she thought, from the looks of the place, and near the Grand Canyon, which in this ancient time wasn't grand yet at all. She did all sorts of amazing things in the past, before dinosaurs even walked the earth. 

But she never saw Pecos Bill again.


End file.
